The more of liberal Lisa and Conservative Colin’s money the government is spending and the more power it has over their lives, then the more anger, hatred and resentment will boil up between the Lisa’s and the Colin’s of this world. And the more likely they are to believe that peacefully coexisting with people who have different political views is impossible and/or undesirable. If they have kids, they’ll raise them to think the same way. It’s a sad thought.
The moment we start believing that good society is only possible if everyone is in total agreement is when we start calling for the government to get tougher — even tougher. And that’s how freedom dies.
To avoid leaving our children in a future society with much less economic and social freedoms, we need to make government much less important in our lives. We need there to be far fewer laws and we need governments to be spending much less.
Whether your chosen livelihood exists or not shouldn’t depend on who the Prime Minister or the Mayor of London is. Whether your child can go to the school they want to go to, whether you can access the medical treatment you need, whether you can employ someone, whether someone can employ you, whether you can start a business or enter a profession, whether you can say what you want; none of these things should depend on rules created by people in government who (wrongly) believe it is possible to, it is their duty to and it is ethical to plan society for the better by using the coercive apparatus of the state to force people like lab rats through a maze of government edicts.
The melting pot of politics is boiling over because, today, every act of local and central government feels like life or death to many people — and in some cases, it may literally be so. The next one can mean having an income or not, it can mean receiving life-saving medical treatment or not, it can mean getting the education you want or not, it can mean having the career you want or not, it can mean being able to afford to live where you want to or not; ultimately, it can mean living your life according to your own choices or someone else’s.
It’s not surprising, then, that these days most UK politicians are being verbally abused on social media and even threatened with violence by members of the public. The stakes of each government turn this way or that way are far too high and it’s sending many people into a rage. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Today, the western world is awash with varying degrees of anger and fear among the public. The only way to calm us all down and restore civility to politics is to significantly reduce the control that governments have over our property and our lives.
If we don’t, then people will only get angrier, and governments will only gain more power to control people’s lives as the political Left and Right take turns in expanding state power to hurt the people they’re either afraid of or angry about.
